When Dorothy Proudfoot moved to The Long Home last fall, Jean Mowrer welcomed her with flowers, a tour and a standing invitation to dinner.
The two residents quickly discovered they shared the same sense of humor — and a determination steelier than their blue eyes.
After a few months of casual conversations, Dorothy and Jean found they had something else in common.
A mother.
The half-sisters last saw each other more than 70 years ago, when Jean was a pretty little girl who wore her blonde hair with bangs and a center part.
Now the long-separated sisters live on the second floor of The Long Home, a Lancaster personal-care residence for people with limited means.
Life took Dorothy, 89, and Jean, 78, on very different, sometimes tragic, paths.
Dorothy married and raised a daughter in the midst of the Depression. Jean, who was orphaned as a teen, battled crippling health problems and lifelong loneliness.
Years ago, Dorothy tried to find Jean. Eventually she gave up.
As the years between them piled up, each assumed the other was dead.
But Dorothy and Jean somehow ended up in the same place, a serendipitous discovery that has them embracing faded family memories and trying to make up for all those lost years.
Growing up apart
When Dorothy was about 5, her parents, Amos and Verna Ammon, got a divorce.
Her mother moved away and later married Jean's father, Frank Mowrer. Dorothy went to live with her grandparents in Pomeroy.
"I knew my mother, but I didn't know her as a mother," Dorothy says. "My Granny and Pap were the world to me."
Dorothy's Granny was deaf, and her Pap was blind. But she had a loving home and plenty of food straight from the garden.
Despite the tough economic times of the 1930s, Jean also remembers her early childhood in Paoli as reasonably happy.
"We never went hungry," she says. "We always had something."
But the women's mother died at just 40 years old, after a seizure.
Dorothy and Jean saw each other for occasional visits until Frank Mowrer moved his family, including 4-year-old Jean, to West Virginia to find work as a stone mason.
After several years in West Virginia, Mowrer had a heart attack. He and his children moved to the Lititz area to be closer to family.
Mowrer died two years later, when Jean was about 14.
Living separate lives
In 1939, Dorothy and Elwood Proudfoot started married life in an attic apartment with no running water.
"It was rough sledding," she says. "He didn't have a dime. I didn't either."
The Proudfoots eventually settled in Coatesville. Elwood served in the Army during World War II, then worked as a welder at Lukens Steel for 38 years.
Dorothy nearly died while giving birth to their daughter, Patricia Settle, who now lives in Ronks.
Between them, Dorothy and Jean have more than a dozen full, half- and step-siblings, who are now deceased.
Dorothy, a grandmother of two and great-grandmother of three, always regretted losing touch with her siblings.
She tracked down some of them but couldn't find Jean.
"I would think about her a lot," Dorothy says. " ... It's pitiful for families to get separated and not keep in touch."
Jean, who has suffered from seizures and memory problems since childhood, recalls painful treatment by her family.
After their father's death, her two full siblings shunned her, Jean says. She received little formal education and couldn't read, write or hold a job.
Jean got by on public-assistance checks until a Lititz woman took her in.
"She was the only one who wasn't ashamed of me," she says. "She stuck by me."
Jean barely remembered Dorothy. But as years passed, Jean figured that like her other siblings, Dorothy was dead — or wanted nothing to do with her.
Coming Home
In 1994, Jean's landlord raised the rent, and she could no longer afford to stay in her Lititz apartment.
She moved to The Long Home, at 200 N. West End Ave.
Dorothy's husband of 60 years died in 1999. She guarded her independence fiercely, living alone in their trailer in Gordonville.
But severe spinal deterioration led to recent stays in a hospital and nursing home. Dorothy moved to The Long Home in November.
It was a difficult adjustment.
Dorothy can no longer see well enough to do needlepoint and ceramics. She dreads sorting through the lifetime of memories still in her trailer.
"My home's gone, my money's gone, everything is gone," she says.
Dorothy liked Jean, who is on the home's welcoming committee, right away. Jean was kind and a good listener.
For weeks, they sat next to each other at meals, never suspecting they were anything more than new friends.
"I only knew her by Jean, and she only knew me by Dorothy," Dorothy says.
It wasn't until earlier this month that Dorothy noticed the familiar last name on Jean's place card.
Now Dorothy and Jean play bingo and Pokeno together. But mostly they look through old photos and rekindle long-buried memories.
"I'm so sorry things weren't different," Dorothy says. "(But) it's all in the past.
"We have each other now."
CONTACT US: mschweigert@LNPnews.com or 291-8757 
